“Fuckin …” Bob started to say, but he heard the shuffle of someone behind him and something icy and sharp bit into his throat and squeezed off any further words as well as his breath.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” the voice said calmly in his right ear. “But you’ll need to stop struggling. Do you understand?”
Bob tried to draw air in through his nose, but the cord — or wire — around his throat restricted that, too. He reached up involuntarily with both hands to feel what was choking him, but the man slapped his hands down.
“Relax. I’m not going to hurt you. I just need some information.”
Bob could feel his heart whumping, and a voice inside his head told him to stay still. He lowered his hands and rocked back slightly, which lessened the pressure of the thin wire noose — or whatever it was. His eyes had readjusted to the dark, and he glanced toward his store, hoping Rhonda would see what was happening at the front door. She wasn’t there.
“Do you remember me?” the man asked, his lips inches from Bob’s ear. “Do you recognize my car?”
Despite the biting pain it caused, Bob managed to shake his head. Even though he remembered the Audi Q7.
The man behind him chuckled. “Oh, we both wish it were so. Now, listen to me carefully, Bob. I’m going to ease up on you so you can talk. Like I said, all I need is information. Then, if you help me out and you don’t turn around and you walk straight back into your little store, everything will be fine. You’ll have an abrasion on your neck, but that’s all. Do you hear me?”
Although spangles were replacing the stars in the night sky, Bob managed to nod.
“Okay,” the man said, and the pressure eased, but the wire was still cutting into the soft flesh of Bob’s throat. “I’m looking for a house. Seven seventeen Farm Station Street. The street numbers here on the reservation — I can’t make heads or tails of them.”
Bob knew that to be true, and it was something he was used to. No one ever used street or house numbers, anyway. They just said, “I’ll meet you at Mary’s house” or “turn west by where Jimmy Nosleep used to live.”
“I don’t know the numbers,” Bob croaked. “Tell me who you’re looking for.”
“Alice Thunder,” the man said. “She works at the school.”
Bob felt a stab of pain in his heart. If this man would do this to him, what would he do to Alice? Everyone loved Alice. …
As if the man could read his thoughts, the wire cinched tighter, and Bob groaned.
“Where does she live?” the man asked.
Bob thought, I’ll tell him. Then I’ll call Alice and tell her to run like hell and I’ll call the tribal police right after that. Then he’d call his buddies and tell them to grab their hunting rifles and meet him at Alice’s place, where they’d teach this son-of-a-bitch a lesson before the cops got there. He still couldn’t quite believe how quickly the man in the dark crossover — the man Nate Romanowski had asked him about — had taken his rifle and slipped the garrote over his head. He looked again at his store and wordlessly begged Rhonda to look out.
Then, when the noose eased, Bob said, “Go down this street in front of us about a mile and a half and turn right on a dirt road just past a big stack of hay. Her house is half a mile from that, on your left.”
“Ah,” the man said. “I was right by it earlier and didn’t see it. You people need to come up with a numbering system that makes sense.”
Because of the wire around his neck and the man’s hands on the wire, Bob felt intimately connected to this person, and he could feel it when the man shifted his weight, as if he were digging something out of a pocket.
His keys. There was a dull thunk of an electronic lock releasing. In his peripheral vision, Bob saw the trunk of the vehicle lift on its own and an interior light come on inside. Until that moment, he’d thought he had a chance. No longer.
“We’re going for a ride now,” the man behind him said, and steered him toward the open trunk. Bob saw that thick clear plastic sheeting had been laid down inside.
“I thought you said …”
Bob never finished his question before the wire was cinched tight and his world went black and the last thing he saw was the after-image of the hawk flying across the surface of the moon and he wished he’d understood earlier what it foretold.
PART THREE
No living man can, or possibly ever will,
understand the instinct of predation that we
share with our raptorial servant. No man-made
machine can, or ever will, synthesize
that perfect coordination of eye, muscle, and
pinion as he stoops to his kill.
13
Nate Romanowski reached the outskirts of Colorado Springs as the morning sun lit up the fresh snowfall on the western slope of the mountains in a brilliant green and white palette. There had been a light snowfall during the night that was melting away in the high-altitude sun, and wisps of steam wafted up from the asphalt. His tires hissed on the wet surface. It was Tuesday, October 23.
For the last seven and a half hours, he’d driven straight through the state of Wyoming from north to south on Interstate 25 and squeezed through Denver before the morning traffic approached its apex. Because he had no cell or satellite phone and he paid cash for food and fuel and therefore created no credit card receipts, his route and movements were untraceable.
The U.S. Air Force Academy glinted like a glass-and-steel castle fortress in the foothills to the west as the highway expanded to three, then four lanes. Cars and pickups streamed onto the highway from entrance ramps, drivers sipping coffee and dressed for work. An SUV shot by him, driven by an attractive fortyish woman applying lipstick in her rearview mirror and singing along with a song on the radio. Nate smiled to himself because he’d been away so long he’d almost forgotten what it was like to experience the morning rush of normal Americans going to work at normal jobs for normal hours. The pure dynamism and hurly-burly of the scene made him wistful.
Seeing the Academy brought back a flood of memories, several so powerful they made him wince. He recalled arriving there as a freshman just appointed by Montana senators, a tall and raw-boned middle linebacker with a buzz cut, still stinging from his goodbyes and from releasing his falcons to the wind. The upperclassman cadets jeered and confronted him, and he was paired with an older cadet named Vince Vincent who informed him that as of that moment he was his “dooley”—all freshmen were dooleys — and he had no past, no reputation, no rights, and no value as a human being. It was Nate’s responsibility, Vincent said, to start his life over at zero. And he could start by shining Vince Vincent’s boots. Nate gritted his teeth, said, “Yes, sir,” and dropped to his knees with a brush and jar of polish. Vincent stood there in the gleaming hallway with his hands on his hips and his chin in the air while other cadets walked by and laughed.
The humiliation continued. Between classes, orientation, and football practice, Nate fetched Vincent’s lunch and dinner, ironed and hung his uniform, and cleaned up after him. Nate was asked to stand at attention outside the bathroom stall while Vincent had his morning bowel movement, and to note on a pad the shape and number of excrement bits Vincent called out to him.
He spent days shadowing Vincent through the grounds so he was available do his bidding at any moment. The campus was numbered with similar relationships, and dooleys rolled their eyes at one another in shared humiliation as they passed in the hallways. But after a month, Nate observed that most of his classmates, although still designated dooleys, as they would be throughout the first year, spoke comfortably and freely with their assigned cadets. The pairs could be seen walking side by side on the campus, and the cadets became more like mentors and advisers. They even sat together in the cafeteria, where Nate was required to stand at attention beside his cadet in case Vincent dropped a napkin or fork and needed it retrieved immediately.